The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze Narrated by Ralph Lister

Overview

In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. The infinite demands for men and materiel reached into countries far from the front. The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrial order.



A century after the outbreak of fighting, Adam Tooze revisits this seismic moment in history, challenging the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. From the day the United States entered the war in 1917 to the precipice of global financial ruin, Tooze delineates the world remade by American economic and military power. Tracing the ways in which countries came to terms with America's centrality-including the slide into fascism-The Deluge is a chilling work of great originality that will fundamentally change how we view the legacy of World War I.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Gary J. Bass

For anyone seeking to understand how American predominance was achieved in the years after World War I, and why it catastrophically failed to keep the hard-won peace, Adam Tooze has written an essential book. Epic in scope, boldly argumentative, deftly interweaving military and economic narratives, The Deluge is splendid interpretive history.

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/01/2014
Tooze (The Wages of Destruction), professor of history and codirector of international security studies at Yale University, successfully maps the "emergence of new order of power" from the ashes of WWI. That order was U.S.-centered and had "three major facets—moral authority backed by military power and economic supremacy"—and, Tooze argues, it arose in the context of a "multisided, polycentric search for strategies of pacification and appeasement." America intervened somewhat unwillingly in WWI, after the Eurasian crisis dragged out for several years. Its entry into the war allowed the Entente to secure a victory, but the Treaty of Versailles yielded only a "patchwork world order." The U.S.'s synergy of "exceptionalist ideology" and "Burkean wisdom" gave it a conservative perspective on its future—a perspective that, Tooze argues, clashed immediately with its "pivotal role" in a fragile global economy. The "great democratic alliance" imploded during the Great Depression—not from "deluded idealism," but from a search for a "higher form of realism." Tooze's grand economic history is stimulating, persuasive, and surprisingly accessible. Illus. Agency: Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

Winner of the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize — History 

“For anyone seeking to understand how American predominance was achieved in the years after World War I, and why it catastrophically failed to keep the hard-won peace, Adam Tooze has written an essential book. Epic in scope, boldly argumentative, deftly interweaving military and economic narratives, The Deluge is a splendid interpretive history.” — The New York Times Book Review
 
“A grand and groundbreaking reinterpretation of World War I and its aftermath.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“A globe-spanning and wide-ranging examination of how America’s historic decision to join that epochal war changed the U.S. as well as the entire world order, ‘The Deluge’ is also a look at a past that is both terribly remote and hauntingly familiar.”—Salon
 
“Massive, well-researched and eminently readable.”—The Washington Times

“Tooze guides us through the numerous diplomatic and economic catastrophes that emerged from World War I. Eventually we start to get a well-rounded and extremely comprehensive insight into why Wilson’s American foreign policy was so misguided.... Excellent... provide[s] us with a superb insight into the collapse of a stable Europe.”—The Daily Beast
 
“Tooze’s analysis, particularly of fears the American capitalist juggernaut provoked, should spark debate, especially in scholarly circles.”—Booklist
 
“A thoroughly researched, much-needed reexamination of America’s role in the aftermath of World War I that will appeal to any reader interested in the interwar period.”— Library Journal, Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, FL
 
“In this landmark study, Tooze offers an elegant account of the reordering of great-power relations that took place after World War I, at the dawn of ‘the American century.’”— Foreign Affairs, G. John Ikenberry
 
“Adam Tooze’s utterly hypnotic study reaches back to a time in which fragile economies across the world were every bit as intertwined and acutely vulnerable, and where unforeseen economic shocks could be enough to trigger apocalyptic bloodshed. What Adam Tooze has done—a huge, formidable achievement—is to reconstruct a vast global web, and to show how the slightest vibrations on its threads had consequences everywhere, almost regardless of individual fears and hates or venomous ideologies. The breadth of his scholarship also frighteningly illuminates the fragility of peace.” — The Telegraph (UK)
 
“Tooze shows, more emphatically than any other scholar I have read, how decisively and how sweepingly the First World War ended this state of affairs….Tooze's brilliant account also offers much food for thought for any observer of the current international scene.” —The Guardian
 
“The Deluge sets a provocative framework for studies of the Great War, one that places issues of US power and American history at the center. Its well-written critique of US leadership and its insightful account of the intricate policies of the major powers deserve a wide readership among those who wish to understand how the world careened from the Great War into the Great Depression.” —Current History
 
“Bold and ambitious... The Deluge is the work of a fine historian at the peak of his powers, formidable in its range and command of the material, written in strong, muscular prose.... The best of the current deluge of books about the first world war.”—Ben Shephard, The Observer (UK)

“[Tooze’s] new book confirms his stature as an analyst of hugely complex political and economic issues…. Here, as in his earlier work, Tooze shows himself a formidably impressive chronicler of a critical period of modern history, unafraid of bold judgments.”—Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (UK)

“Tooze’s book is an invaluable account of why the US and its allies, having defeated Germany in 1918, were unable thereafter to stabilise the world economy and build a collective security system.”—The Financial Times

“Amid all the current commemorative news, a clear and compelling rationale as to why it is actually worth going back and looking at the era of the First World War at this particular moment in time.”—Neil Gregor, Literary Review

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"Tooze's grand economic history is stimulating, persuasive, and surprisingly accessible." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2014-09-16
A vigorously defended argument that the war to end all wars was really the origin of a new world order and American superpower. Taking a truly global view of World War I, Tooze (History/Yale Univ.; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, 2007, etc.) holds that the conflict was Europe's undoing in more ways than one. Obviously, it laid the groundwork for the global war to follow, but it also announced the arrival of an America that was able to act unilaterally on the world stage. The huge bloodletting also left the losing, and even some of the victorious, powers politically unstable. The author highlights Hitler, of course, but also Leon Trotsky as representatives of a sweeping change by which the war "opened a new phase of ‘world organization.' " What is novel about Tooze's thesis is that, in this light, Hitler, Mussolini and the military leaders of Imperial Japan saw themselves as rebels against this new world order, which oppressed Germany financially and dismissed Italian and Japanese claims for rewards for their parts in defeating the Central Powers; all resented the notion that the terms of the transition to this new world order were dictated by the upstart United States. Interesting, too, is the author's interpretation of America's artful use of soft power, favoring political and economic influence over direct military intervention whenever possible. One negative consequence was Wilson's negotiation of a "peace without victory" at the end of the war that promoted a subsequent instability made lethal with the worldwide economic collapse a decade later. In discussing what he calls "the fiasco of Wilsonism," Tooze sometimes drifts into highly technical economic matters such as the mechanics of hyperinflation, but his narrative is gripping—and sobering, since readers well know the tragedies that followed. A lucid, first-rate history of the results of a war whose beginning a century ago we are busily commemorating.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171297954
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	11/13/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,042,089

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Deluge"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Adam Tooze.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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